US TV channel ESPN just published their list of the World’s toughest sports. The goal was to find the sport that demands the most of the athlete based upon the degree of difficulty – in other words the toughest sport.
A group of panel experts made up of among other sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee and sport journalists used 10 categories, or skills, that go into athletic performance. The panel made their list by:
“Assigning a number from 1 to 10 to the demands each sport makes of each of those 10 skills. By totaling and averaging their responses, we arrived at a degree-of-difficulty number for each sport on a 1 to 100 scale.
The conclusion was that boxing was the most demanding sport and fishing the least demanding.